"Mother Father God, we ask your everlasting peace upon the souls of the women,
whose agonizing sickness pierced the sunlight, whose screams of terror filled the night astheir womanhood was violated by beasts wearing the form of men.For the
women, who lost their lives to despair when their infants were torn from their breasts;
who gathered their skirts into nooses to find the final freedom; who squeezed the life
from their own babies to save them from the horrors that lay ahead...

"...For the Afrikan women who died in the Middle Passage, we your children ask,
may God have mercy on their souls.

"Mother Father God, we ask your everlasting peace upon the souls of the children,
who cried endless tears for want of the embrace of their mothers and fathers; whose
budding womanhood and manhood was ravaged by their captors under cloak of night; who
withered away unable to fight the diseases of their oppressors; who fell into waste-filled
tubs and were drowned...

"...For the Afrikan children who died in the Middle Passage, we your children ask,
my God have mercy on their souls."

Excerpt from The Ancestral Mass
Eraka Rouzorondu
1992

On September 15, 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama on a Sunday morning, the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church was bombed by white supremacists and four little girls' Denise McNair age
11, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carol Robertson all age 14 were killed. Only one
man, a Ku Klux Klan member, was tried and convicted for his role in the bombing (14 years
after the fact) although as many asfive others were believed to have been
involved. The case now has been reopened - perhaps because of pressure generated by Spike
Lee's feature length documentary about the attack titled Four Little Girls.

A recent headline in The Washington Post stated, "Controversy Erupts
Over Civil Rights Memorial / Nude Statues Depicting Victims of 1963 Birmingham
Church-Bombing Are Criticized asRacist." The six column story on August 17th
included a photograph of the sculpture titled, "That Which Might Have Been,
Birmingham, 1963" with John Henry Waddell, a white man who is the sculptor, standing
in the middle of the four figures who stand in a circle facing outward. Waddell chose to
depict the four young victims as adult, nude women and used 19 models - almost all of them
white women.

One bronze casting of Waddells sculpture is permanently installed at the First
Unitarian Universalist Church of Phoenix and the other is in Waddell's Arizona studio
awaiting approval of a site in Birmingham - an effort that has created strong controversy
in Birmingham and also within the Unitarian Universalist Church. The Washington Post
reported that the church's anti-racism committee stated, "The statue is weighted with
both historic and contemporary symbols of oppression. Among these is the historic
availability of black womenas sexualobjects to white men, the definition
of the future of these girls as oneof being merely sexual objects, and the visual
similarity of the statue to depictions of the slave auction blocks." However, Jack
Thorp, president of the Unitarian Church in Birmingham, was quoted as stating, "None
of us dreamed there would be any problem getting the sculptures here. It's amazing how
naive we were. I think it was a lack of sophistication out there. People couldn't get over
the fact that they were nude."

The night before reading the story in The Washington Post, I had returned from
my third trip to Ghana in West Africa. We again had visited Accra which is a city of 1.8
million people, Kumasi the center of the Asante empire of the 18th and 19th centuries and
Akosombo the site of the hydroelectric dam on the Volta river that creates one of the
largest lakes on the planet. And as before, we had journeyed westward up the coast from
Accra to the slave dungeons of Elmina and Cape Coast. Of the 60 slave dungeons on the west
coast of Africa, 40 were built by the Europeans in Ghana alone. Elmina was established by
the Portuguese in 1482 as their first fort on the West Coast of Africa and the Dutch
forcefully took it over in 1637. Cape Coast was established as the Swedish fort
'Carolusburg' in 1653 and was later controlled by the Dutch and British.

At Elmina, the largest slave dungeon on the West African coast, we walked across the
drawbridge over the moat and into the central courtyard that contains a structure that
once was a Roman Catholic Church.

Over the centuries, tens of thousands of captive African people were taken through the
central courtyard past the door of the church and into the dungeons. When the Dutch
captured Elmina from the Portuguese they turned the Catholic church into a storehouse, put
their Protestant church in a room above the dungeons filled with African people and
inscribed on its wall these lines from Psalm132: "Zion is the Lord's resting
place. This Is His eternal habitation."

In the central courtyard the girls and young women were separated from their fathers,
brothers and husbands and placed in the female dungeon. Each evening they were forced into
the small courtyard of the female dungeon and the Governor General of Elmina, standing on
his balcony above, selected the African girl or young woman that he would rape that night.
She was forced to climb the stairway from the courtyard up through the trapdoor into his
quarters. I will never forget one day standing stunned in that courtyard asa white
man and woman walked from the Governor Generals quarters onto the balcony laughing.

In the book Yurugu : An African-Centered Critique Of European Cultural
Thought And Behavior Dr. Marimba Ani of Hunter College states, "In the African
view of the human, the emotional-spiritual and the rational-material are inextricably
bound together, and if anything, it is ahuman being's spirituality that defines
her ashuman, providing the context within which she is able to create art aswell
astechnology. Such a view leads to a very different emphasis in artistic
expression. The emotional identification with, and participation in the art form by the
person and the community are primary values that help to determine its shape. In this way
the form itself becomes less of an 'object.' In European culture the tendency and emphasis
are much the opposite. While artists my still attempt to evoke certain isolated emotional
responses from their audiences, these responses theoretically have very little 'cultural'
or 'moral' significance, and the entire experience from the creation of the objet d'art to
its presentation is much more 'individualized.'"

In Haile Gerimas deeply thought provoking Sankofa, filmed at Elmina and Cape
Coast, there is a powerful narration voiced by Oscar Brown, Jr. that at the beginning and
end of the film calls out, "Spirit of the dead, rise up and tell your story ..."
Eurocentric cultural imperialism defines itself asthe "universal" human
aesthetic expression and falsely defines all other aesthetics - Afrocentric particularly -
asbeing narrow or parochial. This is what makes the Eurocentric aesthetic an unfit
base for rising up and telling our story. Waddell's execution of his artistic vision and
Thorp's belief that our objection to the sculpture is the result of "a lack of
sophistication" both unconsciously grow out of a sick white supremacist philosophy
that is at the center of Eurocentricity in our time. If we, as a African people in
America, do not understand that in 1997 we are engaged in an ongoing struggle with a
Eurocentric culture structured to be outwardly cloaked in the appearance of acceptable
moral behavior for the purpose of disarming its intended cultural and political victims,
then in the words of the litany of The Ancestral Mass "...my God have mercy on
our souls."